A day in the life of an Engineer.

July 12, 2016By Scott Millar

A day in the life of an Engineer.

The Challenge.

As product diversity and complexity grow, manufacturers want to fabricate products that combine hardware, electronics, and software orchestrated using product data stored in multiple authoring tools. With Actify Centro, design and engineering teams can combine these diverse data sources into one holistic overview of product data to do their jobs faster.

The pressure to bring products to market quickly and inexpensively is intense. A design engineer’s life is tough addressing multiple downstream requirements during design. Satisfying manufacturability, assembly, quality, reliability and servicing requirements while collaborating across different departments involving many stakeholders. Markets are facing massive change under the impact of the (iot) Internet of Things. Design Engineers are trying to figure out how they can enrich their products in terms of more intelligence, to make them “smart products”.

Manufacturers face quite a lot of challenges, not only regarding production issues but also engineering, as the customer’s demand more individualized products or services. This challenge calls for greater cooperation internally and with the supplier base. For the engineers this means that they have to deal with many more components. Engineers in different departments have to work much closer together. A tight integration of the different authoring tools used is necessary – not only in engineering but also during the whole planning, product development and production phases to have real lifecycle management. It is necessary to have a holistic view of a product and all related information at every point in its lifetime. That’s the reason why Actify introduced a new tool that delivers a much more comprehensive approach than just authoring application integration.

The Solution.

Actify Centro provides a single, intuitive user interface for all engineering product data and CAD sources. The integration platform has a user friendly drag-&-drop action set to help structure information pipelines to migrate product data into Centro. The user can display all available project resources, including bills of materials, physical properties, technical documentation and other associated files. With Centro, engineers have ready access to all the product data, in a clear structure and with high visibility. In addition to helping to organize and structure product data, Actify Centro helps the users capture product changes and change requests. Its revision history functionality tracks the versions for all types of documents at all times.

Turn product data into meaningful information.

Centro’s data discovery platform enables users to gain insight based on available product data, leveraging the available analytics function to produce a desired goal.

About Actify:

Actify, Inc. provides product visualization software to the discrete manufacturing industry for more than 15 years overcoming the challenge of sharing and communicating engineering type documents across the extended enterprise or supply chain. Actify understands product data, from the original designer’s product definition within engineering to disparate product data across a manufacturer’s extended enterprise. Learn More.